Updates from the edge of the Web

RecallMonkey finds what you forget

We make a lot of web searches with the intention of finding something we’ve seen before. If you’re trying to recall a page, chances are your browser has seen it before, so it should be able to rediscover it quickly. Unfortunately, the search features built into most browsers are based on exact-match methods. This means that if you’re looking for that “fried blueberry pancake” recipe that you’ve seen before and accidentally remember “fried raspberry pancake,” chances are you’ll get no results because your browser hasn’t seen all the words from your query in one document before.

This is where RecallMonkey comes in. Internet search engines don’t do exact-matching, they rank based on how closely your search query and document matches. So we borrowed a leaf from their book and wrote a ranked search engine on top of Firefox’s history database. Then, we added on some other features like filtering by time and the ability to “pin” websites. For example, you remember that article on water was on Quora, so you can pin Quora (by clicking on its domain name) while searching to prioritize its results. RecallMonkey lets you pin up multiple sites at the same time.

So what are you waiting for, go get the addon and start playing with it! Activate RecallMonkey from the File -> RecallMonkey item on the menu (or the shortcut). As always, the source code is open if you want a look or help us hack, and we’d love to hear what you think of it. Please keep in mind that this is a first implementation and may be buggy, so we welcome your feedback!

Ed hacks on all sorts of Content Services projects including Tiles, UP, Interest Dashboard, and Subscribe2Web and previously hacked on Labs projects like Sync, Account Manager and Prospector. He also helps out with neat Firefox features like the Awesome Bar to help users quickly get to what they want. (Or maybe it's that Ed wants to get quickly to news about Mario and Nintendo games, and everyone benefits!)